Enough With Politifact’s Opinion Journalism

The classic example of PolitiFact running interference for Democrats is its treatment of Barack Obama’s infamous ObamaCare lie, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” The claim was originally rated to be “true” or “mostly true.” Later on, as inconvenient facts emerged proving the claim to be sketchy at best, they downgraded their fact check to “half true.” Only when it became patently obvious to everyone that the claim was a cruel hoax did PolitiFact admit the truth.

In October 2008, PolitiFact said that Obama’s oft-repeated healthcare claim was true. By mid-2009, with Obama safely elected president, it downgraded the claim to half true. In 2012, while Obama was running for re-election, PolitiFact continued to rate the false ObamaCare claim as “half true,” even though it was by then known that a majority of employer-sponsored plans would be illegal under Obamacare.

Only after ObamaCare was implemented in the fall of 2013, and millions of people actually started losing their plans, did PolitiFact rate the claim to be (as everyone with a shred of common sense knew from the beginning) a huge, Pants on Fire, Lie of the Year. Of course, that “fact check” came five years too late for the millions of people who lost their health care plans.